Consumers these days are always looking for something fresh, new and exciting. With the emergence of one-click online shopping, the regular old mall experience is become archaic and less and less popular. Pop-up events are short term experiences created by brands in order to provide consumers with an intimate and memorable shopping experience that allows brands to test their market without committing to the high price of permanent store-front property. Pop-up events usually occupy a space that isn’t known for retail, or take over an empty store front, for a few hours or days, in order to promote a brand and sell merchandise, as the excitement over the new store grows via word-of-mouth and social media. This organic popularity creates an inclusive feeling of being part of something special.

If you’re planning on becoming an event planner, consider the following guide for how to prop up your pop-up game and create a brand event that comes and goes quickly, but creates lasting memories.

Event Planners Use Pop-Up Shops to Generate Buzz and Excitement

Toronto-born artist Drake recently took part in the pop-up craze. 567 Queen Street West in Toronto is usually a nightclub/art venue, but on April 24th, 2016 it became Drake’s personal pop-up event, drawing thousands of fans from the Toronto area with promises of free merchandise posted on Twitter. The venue also had a truck featuring screens playing Drake music videos. The event was used to create buzz for the artist who later that night released his album cover on the internet. If you want to become an event planner, take a tip from Drake; a pop-up event can increase the ‘hype’ around a brand which, in turn, can make other announcements or events even more successful and popular.

An Event Planner Course Will Teach You About the Power of Space

When proposing a pop-up space to your clients, make sure that the space itself can connect with the brand. You aren’t going to do a Chanel pop-up event the nightclub that Drake used, and you wouldn’t want to organize a pop-up event for Jack Daniels inside a church. Also, be aware of the section of the city that it is in; is it a hip neighbourhood? Will people travel out of the city centre for your pop-up event? Event planners must keep all of these variables in mind when planning a brand’s pop-up event location.

The True Power of Using the Pop-Up When You Become an Event Planner

Recent figures from The Lionesque Group, a pop-up event planning group, points out that the pop-up events they have worked with in the previous few years has seen a 35% increase in sales and half of the pop-ups have a 30% increase in social media engagement. When you become an event planner, these striking figures could help your client agree to a pop-up event proposal.

Event Planning Courses Show Students How To Budget Pop-Up Events

A good place to start when determining a budget for a pop-up event is to look at how much the brand you’re promoting is selling their products for. If it’s a luxury brand, it may be essential to have a larger budget in order to maintain a luxury look. For smaller brands whose price point is lower, a smaller budget may be the ticket. Either way, creativity can come in many forms and your pop-up event doesn’t necessarily need to be high-budget to work. In fact, according to Ross bailey, the founder of an online service that pairs landlords with retailers and himself a pop-up event expert, explains that our society currently loves minimalism and industrialism, so being in-style may be more affordable than you think!

Pop-up events don’t have to be expensive, they only need to be creative

Ready to start your first event planner course and take on an exciting career creating innovative pop-up experiences?

Have you ever seen George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? How about Jaws? Or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? All these films are hailed for spot-on acting and great story lines, but another important element—their music scores—also deserves credit as well.

Movie soundtracks help to convey emotion, keep audiences engaged, and bring to life the worlds portrayed onscreen. But how do directors decide which songs should be included in their films?

If you’re passionate about movies, keep reading to find out how great directors make their music choices and how you can begin to choose the perfect music for your films.

Film Students Learn that Pre-released Music can be a Great Choice for Their Movies

It’s likely that as a student in movie making school, you might not initially have the budget to hire a music composer for your films. A composer will craft a special score specifically for your movie, scene-by-scene. But when you aren’t in a position to hire a composer, you’ll have to choose pre-existing music to compliment your visuals. Fortunately, that might not always be a bad thing.

In the recent blockbuster film Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, many of the songs present in its stellar soundtrack had previously been released. That didn’t stop the soundtrack from scoring a spot on the Billboard 200!

Copyrights for songs can get expensive, though. For instance, the film Varsity Blues used AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and paid a cool half a million dollars to do so. Fortunately, many students can find songs for their movies through websites that provide open source music for films. If you’re looking for a song or two for your movie, you could try a site like the Free Music Archive, which has songs grouped by genre and style.

Characters in Film Students’ Projects can Have their Very Own Theme

Characters sometimes have their very own theme music, or motif—a small succession of melodic notes—that accompany certain instances of them appearing on screen. One great example of this is in John William’s soundtrack for Jaws, where each main character has a motif that accompanies them. The most famous of these, of course, is the undeniably eerie orchestral “du-duh,” that accompanies the emergence of the shark “Jaws.” When the orchestral “du-duh” plays during Jaws, the audience knows the shark is coming before it is even shown.

Film courses can teach students that adding specific motifs that represent characters, whether through songs or sounds, is a great way to tell a cinematic story without always needing to use visuals.

Film Course Students Learn that the Scene and the Music Don’t Always Need to Match

Once you begin shooting and scoring your own movies, you might soon learn that one way to make a scene stand out is to utilize music that seems to run counter to the content of the scene. One example of this is in Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, where a violent scene is paired with the upbeat feel-good song Stuck in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel. In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Tarantino explained that he made actors audition for the scene using the song, and right away he knew it would be a hit. The contradiction of the emotion in the music and the contents in the scene proved to be a powerful and unique approach.